kottke.org posts about sandwiches
A couple of years ago, frustrated by a takeout Italian sandwich with unevenly distributed fillings, I had a wonderful, life-changing idea: chopped sandwiches. It’s like what you get at those chopped salad places but instead of chopping up all the ingredients and putting them into a bowl, you put them between two slices of bread or in a hoagie roll or whatever. That way, you get all of the elements of the sandwich — cheese, tomato, lettuce, dressing/mayo, onion, whatever — in every single bite. Yum.
Chopwiches already exist — tuna salad, Philly cheesesteaks, chicken salad, egg salad — and they’re amazing because you get all of their deliciousness in every bite. I just wanted to extend that enjoyment to many other types of sandwich: banh mi, BLT, Italian sub, gyro, turkey club, and even the humble ham and cheese. Great idea, right? I wanted to open a chopped sandwich restaurant and change the world.
Then I made a mistake: I told people about my idea. And every single one of them laughed at me. To my face! My friends, my kids, everyone. It was a heartbreaking moment but as an entrepreneur, I knew I had to persist and follow my dream. Like Wayne Gretzky said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” And I was going to win.
But the whole thing became a joke for awhile and I had to play along, biding my time. My friend Caroline came up with a name: Choppke’s. We brainstormed slogans and things the sandwich artists could say to patrons:
- Choppke’s. You’ll Love It to Bits.
- Welcome to Choppke’s, your wich is my command.
- As you wich. [In response to any customer query.]
- Welcome to Choppke’s! What can I get chopping for you today?
I asked ChatGPT to come up with a logo; this was my favorite one:
When (not if!) Choppke’s gets huge, there’s gonna be a corporate jet, so I wanted to see what that was going to look like:
Caroline got me a custom-made hat for my birthday (actual hat and actual dopey human wearing it, not AI-generated):
Ever so slowly, I was winning her over, despite every fiber of her being telling her that a chopped sandwich restaurant was the stupidest idea she’d ever heard and causing her to question the entire basis of our relationship. And if I could get one person on my side, a person who thought I was an idiot, the rest of the world would surely follow. Ideas + persistence = manifesting your reality.
I think it was the legendary management guru Michael Scott (quoting IBM founder Steve Jobs) who said “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. Well, my long chopped sandwich skate has finally paid off — the puck is here! According to The Takeout, the chopped sandwich is all the rage on TikTok!
If you enjoy a good chopped salad, the kind where every component (veggies, cheese, protein) is chopped into uniformly forkable bites and then tossed in dressing, you’re halfway to a chopped salad sandwich, sometimes just referred to as a chopped sandwich. It’s simply any version of that same salad, just stuffed into a hinge-cut roll. The shape of the roll is crucial, as it prevents all the fillings from falling out the sides.
Yes, exactly. Wow. I’ve never felt so seen. What’s that smell? No, not a delicious chopped sandwich…it’s the sweet smell of V-I-N-D-I-C-A-T-I-O-N.
Nearly any filling is a candidate for a chopped salad sandwich, and that’s the part that appeals most to TikTok users. Beyond the go-to Italian sub, you can create chopped salad sandwiches that contain Vietnamese banh mi ingredients, wedge salads, Caesar salads, whatever your heart desires. And that versatility means it’s a goldmine for social media content.
A goldmine! You’re goddamn right it’s a goldmine! The time is right, the market is PRIMED, Gen Z is on board, it’s now or never. We’re gonna do it, Choppke’s is a go!
Now, just to properly calibrate expectations, I haven’t looked at any commercial real estate nor have I made a single chopped sandwich of any kind at home to test out whether they actually taste better or not because I just know they will. What I do have is the idea (which is amazing, as we’ve agreed), a janky misspelled AI logo, and a dream.
Right now, you’re probably wondering how you can help, how you can climb aboard this rocket ship, how you can secure a place in a better future for us all. Well, I’m happy to announce that you can join the movement for better, tastier sandwiches today by zhuzhing yourself up with an exclusive Choppke’s t-shirt!
All proceeds from shirt sales will be pumped into developing the Choppke’s franchise (or, if that doesn’t work out, buying myself sandwiches from the local deli). Thanks for the support everyone — even though I could have done it without you, I definitely couldn’t have done it without you.
In today’s post on “What is barbecue?” I skipped past “is a hot dog a sandwich?” so quickly that I forgot to answer the question. So in the same spirit in which someone can boldly declare that only smoked, slow-cooked pork is barbecue, here is my minimal definition of a sandwich:
A sandwich is any solid or semi-solid filling between two or more slices of bread. Not a roll, not a wrap, not a leaf of lettuce: sliced bread. What is inside far less than the container.
Consequently:
- A hot dog is not a sandwich.
- A burrito is not a sandwich.
- A wrap is not a sandwich.
- A cheeseburger on a roll is not a sandwich. Sliced bread only.
- A lobster roll is not a sandwich.
- A hoagie is not a sandwich.
- An ice cream sandwich is not a sandwich.
- A hot turkey sandwich is not a sandwich.
- An open-faced sandwich is not a sandwich.
- If you make a sandwich using one end of the bread and one proper slice, it’s kind of a sandwich still, but not really. See also folding over a single slice of bread for a half-sandwich.
- If you make a sandwich using both ends of the bread, it is no longer a sandwich at all.
- A peanut butter or grilled cheese sandwich is a sandwich.
- A mayonnaise, butter, or ketchup sandwich is probably a sandwich — I’m not sure whether those fillings are solid enough — just not a very good one.
- A sandwich made with crackers instead of bread is not a sandwich, but an imitation of a sandwich.
- A sandwich made with crackers between two slices of bread is a sandwich, but not a very good one.
Alternatively, “sandwich” is a family-resemblance concept and we can’t appeal to definitional consistency to get away from the fact that language is a complex organism and its rules don’t always make perfect sense.
(PS: I do not speak for Jason or Kottke.org on this matter, please do not argue with him about sandwiches)
Update (from Jason): Boy, you leave Tim to his own devices for a few hours and he establishes the official kottke.org stance on sandwiches. [That new emoji of the yellow smiley face grabbing its chin and looking skeptical that you might not have on Android IDK I’m Apple Man] I was just talking to my kids the other day about this important issue and Ollie, who is almost 9, told me that both hamburgers and hot dogs are sandwiches because “the meat is sandwiched in between the bread; it’s right there in the word”. When Ollie and Minna take over the family business in 2027, they can revisit this, but for now, Tim’s definition stands.
Update: Tim’s definition has been weakened further. In talking with Stephen Colbert, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg asserted that a hot dog is a sandwich.
Serious Eats put together an extensive guide to the regional sandwich cuisine of the US that covers everything from the universally available sloppy joe and grilled cheese to the spiedie, the hot brown, and the dutch crunch.
An international edition is also available (gyro! banh mi! bocadillo! chip butty!).
I’ve only had a few of these…I am clearly not exercising my sandwich muscles enough these days. (Although the Brazilian sandwich at Project Sandwich has been treating me well lately.)
The ham sandwich theorem is sometimes called ham and cheese sandwich theorem, the pancake theorem, and the Stone-Tukey theorem but not the sandwich theorem.
The ham sandwich theorem is also sometimes referred to as the “ham and cheese sandwich theorem”, again referring to the special case when n = 3 and the three objects are
1. a chunk of ham,
2. a slice of cheese, and
3. two slices of bread (treated as a single disconnected object).
The theorem then states that it is possible to slice the ham and cheese sandwich in half such that each half contains the same amount of bread, cheese, and ham. It is possible to treat the two slices of bread as a single object, because the theorem only requires that the portion on each side of the plane vary continuously as the plane moves through 3-space.
No idea how this is related to the I Cut You Choose conundrum.
Barclay Prime, home of the notorious $100 cheesesteak, says that there’s no evidence of the recession hitting their sandwich sales.
The winner of Jif’s Most Creative Peanut Butter Sandwich Contest this year was the Po’ Boy Peanut Butter Chicken Cheese Steak, created by Jordyn Boyer, age 10. Featuring ingredients like Worcestershire sauce, mozzarella, a hoagie bun, and chicken, that jar of strawberry jelly might find itself collecting dust in the pantry for quite some time.
Jordyn won a $25,000 college scholarship fund, and a lot of respect from Southern chefs everywhere.
One of the entries in the competition was called The Happy Hedgehog. I wonder how happy that hedgehog would be to find itself on Scanwiches.
Sometimes it seems as though the NY Times writes articles just for me: Seven New Sandwiches Try to Make it in New York.
One day last year at the Watchung Deli, at the request of a student from a nearby school, Ben Gualano piled mac-and-cheese onto a chicken cutlet sub with barbecue sauce and bacon, squeezed it shut somehow, and the Benny Mac was born… It’s a full-body experience — like a mud bath, but with extra ooze. One taster said afterward, “There was bacon in there?”
You may remember that I’m a sandwich fan. For dinner last night, I had a surprisingly good turkey sandwich of my own making (the little bit of onion and the pepper was the secret) and have made friends with a particularly good meatball hero and a banh mi near the office. My present sandwich life is entirely satisfying.
Today is National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day and Serious Eats is celebrating by bringing you a whole bunch of PB&J-related stories, including one I sent over about Elvis jetting to Denver for the sole purpose of eating a Fool’s Gold Loaf…an entire hollowed-out loaf of bread crammed with a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly, and a pound of bacon. Mmm mmmmm!!
SupersizedMeals.com is a blog documenting “foodstuffs of epic proportions”. Recently featured were a 100-patty burger, a 29” pizza, and a sandwich made from an entire loaf of bread sliced lengthwise.
Although the sandwich was named so after an 18th century British Earl, its invention dates back to a rabbi who lived in the first century B.C.. In my short history, I’ve eaten more than my fair share of sandwiches and while I can’t consider myself a true connoisseur, the humble sandwich is one of my favorite things to eat and the ultimate in comfort foods.
The keys to a good sandwich are the three Bs: bread, balance, and…ok, there’s only two Bs, but they’re important. Aside from the main ingredient (turkey, tuna, chicken salad, etc.), the bread has the power to make or break a sandwich. The first thing you taste when you take a bite is the bread, so it had better be good and it had better be fresh.
Balance, or how the various parts come together to make a whole sandwich experience, is even more critical than the bread. Too much meat and the sandwich tastes only of meat. (The “famous” delis in NYC are big offenders here…the amount of meat in their sandwiches is way too much. These are sandwiches for showing off, not consumption.) Too much mustard and you overwhelm that beautiful pastrami. The mighty sandwich should not be a lowly conduit for your mustard addiction; why not just eat it straight from the jar? If you’ve got a dry bread, add a slice of tomato, a little extra mayo, or save it for tuna or egg salad. If you’ve got a lot of bread (a Kaiser or sub roll, for example), you’ll probably need more of everything else to balance it out. Make sure the ingredients are distributed evenly throughout the sandwich. You should get a bit of everything in each bite…it’s a BLT, not just an L on toast. If the sandwich maker is doing his job right, you should be able to taste most of the ingredients separately and together at the same time.
Here are a few sandwiches I’ve enjoyed over the years. I haven’t included any of the ones that I regularly make for myself because they’re pretty boring, although IMO, they’re right up there with any of these.
In college, when my friends and I got sick of eating on campus (and had the money to do so), we’d venture across the street to Zio Johno’s, a little Italian place with good, cheap food. At first I just got the spaghetti or lasagna, but one time I tried the Italian sub they offered and I was hooked. The key was the super-sweet sub roll; my measely $3 was enough for both a savory dinner and sweet dessert at the same time. I’ve never found anywhere else that uses bread that sweet.
I’ve lived in NYC for three years now, but I haven’t run across a steak sandwich that rivals the one I used to get on my lunch break at The Brothers’ Deli in Minneapolis. Fried steak, fried onions, and cheddar cheese on a Kaiser roll with a side order of the best potato salad I’ve ever had[1].
Surdyk’s (say “Sir Dicks”) is an institution in Northeast Minneapolis (say “Nordeast”), the finest liquor store and cheese shop around. They also had good croissants (say “Qua Sawn” or “Cross Aunts”) on which they put fresh ham, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. Mmm.
There’s nothing I like more than a good BLT, and Specialty’s in San Francisco has one of the best I’ve had. Secret ingredient: pickles. Also, they didn’t toast the bread, which I usually frown upon, but it worked well anyway.
As for New York, I don’t live close to any good delis, but when I worked in Midtown, I used to zip over to the food court below Grand Central and hit Mendy’s. Their chicken salad is top-notch; the chicken is good quality and it isn’t overwhelmed by the mayonnaise. I’m usually not such a fan of rye bread, but their rye (it’s a light rye) is fantastic and goes very well with the chicken salad. The salami is good too. I usually have half a sandwich with a cup of their chicken noodle.
Do you have a favorite sandwich? Know of any good NYC sandwich spots I should check out?
[1] Although Meg has been making this warm garlic potato salad lately that is a serious contender for the top spot.
Here’s the recipe for the sandwich that Adam Sandler makes in Spanglish; he was taught how by Thomas Keller. “I’m told that making sure that the yolk doesn’t break until you cut the sandwich is key.”
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